I'm sure that Air New Zealand would be happy to not have ads on their IFE if everyone was willing to pay an extra entertainment levy in their fare. Yes I know you can buy movies onboard if you are on the cheapest tickets (included in more expensive ones). Being able to screen new release movies probably costs the airline millions a year and if that means I have to sit through an ad and pay less for my ticket then so be it. As for wifi on aircraft, how much is needed to 'serve' 170 (A320) to 350 (747) portable devices? Pretty impressive system required I think. And with all that extra EM energy flying around the cabin I'm sure it wouldn't be long before someone sued because they were given brain cancer by the wifi on a longhaul flight.

Edit: Additionally the IFE allows the pasenger to order stuff as well doesn't it? Can't do that with a non-emitting ipad.

No, iPad minis are not a solution. They have no decent method of shared data access or lockdown suitable for this situation, they have no inputs for the remote and they would not be cost effective in the least. Apple has also been proven to be entirely apathetic to embedded use of their devices. Something to the tune of GFL guys, BYE!

In 5-10 years they will probably be massively better, but I am sure someone will be moaning that their movies are only in 1080p and not 8k and that they can't play Call of Duty Black Ops 7 at 60fps on there.

Qantas has ipads already, if their PR is to be believed:http://www.qantas.com.au/travel/airlines/wireless-inflight-entertainment/au/en

Better not use 13 in case the plane goes to the US and the FCC bust the airline!

Firstly I acknowledge my limited expertise with wifi (a noob really). But unless the quoted APs have been certified for aircraft use then you need to add some zeroes to the cost (probably 000). Will they allow streaming of video to those 1500 connections? And don't you still have to have a repository for the data in the first place, possibly powered by the same linux software that the OP mentioned?

sbiddle: I'm actually intrigued by the people bashing Linux - what OS do you think a system like this should be running?

No Linux bashing from me in this instance, Linux is fine when setup properly ... the setup AirNZ have is NOT setup properly, as I mentioned before it spewed out errors on startup about real basic stuff, things that the developers of the product should sort before installing it on an aircraft where people wil be staring at it from 1 foot away for 10hours.

That said, I'm not great fan of Linux, too much fragmentation, next to no accountability, feck all documentation on some of the more important features .. basically I hate working on it. But it does have plus points in that it can be twisted into a myriad of different shapes and roles.